Team building has been a lucrative product for training companies since the late 1980’s.

Product managers know that as a product moves through its lifecycle maximising profit depends on adjusting the marketing mix, so does that mean that ‘team coaching’, a term that is in increasing use, is merely team building in new clothes?

In this article, Acorn’s Keith Longney considers team coaching through its use by a team responsible for high cost engineering and plant investment decisions.

Heavy industries like oil and gas, or nuclear, depend on the quality of their long term investment decisions, decisions that over a lifespan will encounter controllable and uncontrollable challenges.

Those challenges can range from political or technological changes to the quality and speed of implementation of the decision.

On such high cost decisions unpredicted changes not only increase costs but also schedule, delaying return on investment.

The example through which we contrast team coaching with team building is with a senior Research and Development (R&D) team tasked with the greatest challenge they had ever faced.